Cannot take snapshot - causing RedHat guest to hang

[rappleby]

Hi,

I have a RedHat 6.6 VM and whenever I try to take a snapshot (Manually or from a backup, in this case Symantec BackupExec 2014), the vm becomes unresponsive and eventually crashes the webserver running on it.

One error message I receive from within vCenter Server 5.5 is:

An error occurred while taking a snapshot: msg.snapshot.error-QUIESCINGERROR.

An error occurred while saving the snapshot: msg.snapshot.error-QUIESCINGERROR.

I am running Oracle Webserver 7 on this RHEL 6.6 VM.

vCenter Server 5.5.0

ESXi 5.5

the VM is on VM version 10

Any help would be appreciated.

thanks,

Rob

[Vdex_ie]

If it is a high I/O VM it may be sensitive to Quiescing and may not be a candidate for snapshotting as the file system is paused and this can crash applications within it.

If you are taking the snapshot manually in ESXi 5.x or ESXi/ESX 4.x, deselect the Quiesce guest file system option in the vSphere Client when you are taking the snapshot.

or

This is a known issue affecting ESXi 5.x.

To work around the issue, set the disk.EnableUUID parameter to false in the virtual_machine.vmx file.

To set the disk.EnableUUID parameter to false in the virtual_machine.vmx file:

1. Connect to the host running the virtual machine with an SSH session.
   
   For more information, see Using ESXi Shell in ESXi 5.x (2004746).
   
   
2. Navigate to the virtual_machine.vmx file located at /vmfs/volumes/virtual_machine_datastore/virtual_machine/.
3. Open the virtual_machine.vmx file using a text editor.
4. Locate the disk.EnableUUID entry within the file.
5. Set the disk.EnableUUID entry to false.
   
   For more information see, Editing configuration files in VMware ESXi and ESX (1017022).
   
   
6. Open a console session to the virtual machine.
7. Open the tools.conf file, located at the /etc/vmware-tools directory, using a text editor.
   
   Note: If the tools.conf file does not exists, create an empty file by running the vi tools.conf command.
   
   
8. Add these parameters to the file:
   
   [vmbackup]
   enableSyncDriver = false
   
   Note: This only runs a sync operation before the snapshot, and does not run a FREEZE on the filesystem.
   
   
9. Save and close the file.

As per VMware KB: Snapshot quiescing fails in Linux guests when disk.enableUUID is set to true in the vmx file

[Lenora_BE]

As far as Backup Exec 2014 this error usually means that the backup has a conflict with VSS providers.  You should push out the remote agent again so the the Backup Exec VSS provider can be installed.